Explaining Objects To Non-Programmers

One of my favorite TechEd 2008 talks was Ben Pearce’s talk, “Windows, PowerShell and WMI – Unveiling Microsoft’s Best Kept Secret”. It was a great talk all up but the one thing I walked away saying, “I’ve got to steal that”, was Ben’s explaining of Objects.

Anyone that has every tried to explain PowerShell to friends or co-workers will inevitably come across a look of fear and panic when you mention the word “Object”. I’ve seen it hundreds of times. I explain how objects actually simplify the problem but after seeing Ben’s talk, I realized that the problem might be that some people don’t even know what an object IS. Here are Ben’s slides for how to explain objects (and arrays of objects) to people that don’t understand them.

I’ve also attached the PPT slides so you can use them as well.

10,000 thanks to superstar Ben Pearce – you really moved the ball forward with this one!

Great example! I’ll be using this when I give a presentation to my colleagues about Powershell.

I love objects! I recommend building your own objects in your scripts, so that you can manipulate the output of your scripts in the same way as you manipulate the output of single cmdlets: using Sort/Where/Format/Out